James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

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All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

It's Tuesday, time for Episode 9 of the serialized audio dramatization of Dinotopia: The World Beneath. You can listen to the track by clicking on the play button below, or by following the direct link to SoundCloud.

Arthur, Oriana, Bix, and Crabb explore further into the caverns, and in the process, each of them discovers more about their own inner lives.

Monday, March 30, 2015

American impressionist Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932) was known for three themes: snowy forests, Venetian lagoons, and opulent interiors. To all three of those subjects he brought an evocative feeling for light and color.

An exhibition of Walter Launt Palmer at New York State's Albany Institute of History and Art features all three of those themes. The show just opened and it will be up through August 16.

The museum has one of the largest holdings of his work, and they'll be showing oil and watercolor paintings, pastels, and drawings, as well as letters and photographs.

When he was just 24 years old, Palmer studied landscape painting with Frederic Church. He shared a studio with Church in New York City from 1878-1881.

Walter Launt Palmer made many trips to Europe. He met John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, John Henry Twachtman, Robert Frederick Blum, and probably a lot of other guys with three names.

After seeing the young Sargent's sketchbooks, Palmer wrote home, "He is but 17 and has done a lot of work, very little in oil."

Palmer was the one who recommended that Sargent should study with Carolus Duran [Edit: Palmer gave up his place in Carolus-Duran's atelier for the younger artist, whom he had met two years earlier in Florence.] Palmer was so impressed with the younger painter's bold and vigorous style that he tried a similar approach himself for a while.

Palmer's winter scenes were constructed with a combination of outdoor studies, photographs, and memory.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

John Renbourn, the eclectic guitarist who co-founded Pentangle, died at his home in Scotland on Thursday. I sketched him during a concert that he gave with Robin Williamson in 1995 in a little country church at Copake Falls, New York.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

(Link from YouTube) Dominic Wilcox is an artist, designer, and inventor who builds working prototypes of delightfully bizarre concepts, such a stained-glass driverless car, GPS shoes that guide you where you want to go, and a hearing device that reverses right and left inputs.

This video introduces us to his thought process, and we get to meet his parents. Mr. Wilcox wrote a book called Variations on Normal illustrated with his comic sketches.

Dominic Wilcox's Binaudios for magnifying faraway urban sounds

Edit: Frank Palmer sent this photo of "WWII acoustic aircraft detection system similar to that of Dominic Wilcox’s “Binaudios” but pre-dating him by about 75 years. These were used by the Brits, Germans, Japanese and others early in the war before the detection of enemy aircraft was taken over by radar."

The Fort Worth Museum of Science is currently presenting an exhibition of the animation art of Warner Brothers director Chuck Jones.

"Chuck Jones brought to animation an unparalleled talent for comic invention and a flair for creating animated characters with distinctive and often wildly eccentric personalities. Jones perfected the quintessentially suave and wisecracking Bugs Bunny, the perpetually exasperated Daffy Duck, the hapless but optimistic Elmer Fudd, and created the incurably romantic Pepé Le Pew, and the eternal antagonists Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner."

Chuck Jones said, "Eschew the ordinary, disdain the commonplace. If you have a single-minded need for something, let it be the unusual, the esoteric, the bizarre, the unexpected."

Like Solomon J. Solomon and some of the other great teacher/practitioners of his day, Speed expresses an insightful respect for the old masters. One thing I like about his concept of "mass drawing" is that it offers the student a natural transition between drawing and painting.

This isn't going to be a workshop. I'm not the teacher, nor will I be comprehensively summarizing the points of the chapters. I'll just share my basic take-away from each reading, and I may show an example of how those thoughts affect — or have affected—my own practice. I'm expecting to learn from you and from the discussion. I will try to answer a few questions, but I'm hoping that members of the forum can help shoulder some of the Q and A.

We'll discuss a new chapter every Friday. The discussion will take place in the blog comments. Let's get started a week from today with the Preface and the Introduction. That's your assignment, and mine, too. Those who have time can do practice exercises related to each chapter as we move through the book.

If someone wants to set up a Facebook or Pinterest group for posting artwork, that would be great, and I'll link to it. (Edit: Here's Pinterest link, thanks Carolyn Kasper. Keita Hopkinson also created a GJ Book Club Facebook page here.) I may stop by for a quick visit, but I'll probably focus most of my attention and comments on the blog so that the forum and discussion will be archived and searchable.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

The normal perception of color depends on having distinct sets of color receptors, including green cones and red cones, each of which has a peak sensitivity to a slightly different wavelength of light.

When their signals are interpreted by the brain, they allow red and green colors to be easily distinguishable.

The photo on the left represents normal color vision, and the one on the right simulates the way things look to people with red-green color blindness. The charts shows how the gap between the green cones and red cones are narrowed in people with red-green color blindness.

Another way to think of it is that for people with color blindness, the red and green signals are making noise on the same channel. It's like having two radio signals going at the same time. You can't make out what they're saying on either station, and red and green end up being mixed up. People with color blindness have the necessary healthy receptors. The only problem is that they're too close to each other.

To address this problem, engineers at EnChroma developed special filters which fine-tune the light going to each of those closely nested receptors. The result is a genuine experience of red, green, purple, and pink colors where they weren't visible before.

The promotional video (link to YouTube) shows the emotional effect of color-blind people trying on the glasses and seeing colors for the first time.

Because there are many kinds of color blindness, EnChroma is careful not to claim that this is a universal cure, but it appears to provide a helpful boost for many deutans. EnChroma/Valspar offers a free online color blindness test to see if they might be suitable.

Reviewers on Amazon say that the glasses sometimes take a while to get used to, and that you have to learn the names for unfamiliar colors. There are also concerns about the build quality and brittleness of the lenses.

We got the tour of the GCA's new teaching space. They just moved into a spacious industrial building, filled with casts and sculptures and figure paintings.

Building on their success in the Water Street Atelier and Grand Central Academy, they have built a community of artists dedicated to upholding classical traditions.
------Grand Central AtelierSuggested Donation podcast interview with James Gurney

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Hombre McSteez, also known as Marty Cooper, strikes again with a new compilation of madcap plein-air animations (Link to YouTube).

Cooper creates the films by shooting a series of stills with his iPhone. He draws the cartoon creatures with paint pens and a Sharpie on many sheets of transparency film held up in front of real scenes.

Evers was born in Germany. He studied art in London at the Slade School, and worked as an illustrator in Sweden and then in the USA. In two rare articles, he offered some valuable picture-making secrets.

1. "I see the painting complete in my mind before I put pencil to paper. If I couldn't see the picture in my mind, I couldn't draw it!"

2. "If the painting is for a client, I first offer a thumbnail sketch for approval. I then redraw it half the size of the final composition to work out the perspective and all the details to full size."

3. "I make a complete pencil drawing, including the design of the waves and the details of the ship. Even the sky shading is indicated. I finally trace it down on the watercolor board for completion."

4. "The camera is a valuable research tool for me and is by no means a competitor. Painting permits portrayal of the essence of an event or scene without the distracting details invariably caught by the camera."

5. "The water surface cannot be copied from photos since the composition, as always, is my own, and waves and reflections must be designed to fit the pattern."

Sunday, March 22, 2015

The lightweight sketch easel works well vertically, too. I used it a few days ago on a painting trip into the winter forest for a study of an old dead pine tree.

The easel attaches to a quick release plate on the tripod. I clipped the watercolor sketchbook to the plywood backboard and painted across the gutter. The palette panel could be set up on either side.

The air was just above freezing, so I was able to use casein colors. Most of this is painted with a half-inch flat travel brush. I did this field study as reference for a studio painting, which I've been documenting for an upcoming instructional video.